Lucky Lady

It takes some lucky breaks to become a successful actress, and so far, Elizabeth Berridge isn’t complaining.

At 20, she landed the role of Mozart’s wife in “Amadeus” when Meg Tilly fractured her foot.

This year the 26-year-old actress got the title role in the La Jolla Playhouse’s current production of German playwright Frank Wedekind’s erotic tragedy “Lulu” after another actress won the role and then decided against taking it.

Berridge won’t say who the first Lulu was--”Then people are going to say . . . ‘ She would’ve been better’ “--but the actress is glad to take the break and is using the emotionally and physically challenging role to fuel an already fast-moving career.

She has a strenuous role to play in “Lulu.” In the three-hour performance Berridge must pose motionless as an artist’s model, execute rapid-fire costume changes, run up and down a three-story spiral staircase and negotiate an inclined stage in long translucent gowns that are as treacherous as they are revealing. She has come close to tripping several times, she says.

“It’s a very odd thing, when you’re out there so long and you have so much to do,” Berridge says. “You go through all kinds of things. Sometimes you’re completely comfortable in the skin of this person and there’s a merging going on. Then sometimes it’s gone and it’s like, ‘Put your hand down. What is it doing there. Everybody’s looking at your hand.’ ”

Berridge must also negotiate the unstable psychological terrain of her character, a Gypsy-turned-vamp whose adulterous shenanigans lead to the deaths of four lovers.

“She would probably have been very different if she had the advantages that we have now,” Berridge says. “If she had seen a psychiatrist, maybe she might’ve been a little more aware of how the past had influenced her. But that would’ve been a different play.”

Berridge, who was raised in an upper-middle-class family in affluent Westchester County, N.Y., doesn’t seem to have much in common with her character. But she says it has been easy to identify with Lulu.

“I’m on the outside, like she is,” Berridge says. “It’s sort of hard to lead a normal life. I don’t have as good an excuse as she does. But I think her quest to see through, not to accept things at face value when she’s told about things, to keep her own impressions of the system, is something I sort of need to do in order to go on in life.”